It was an honour to give the keynote presentation at the OECD - ADBI - State Bank of Vietnam conference on financial literacy and consumer protection.

The talk focused on how evaluation is essential to delivering programs that actually work. Evaluation is a learning process - it helps us learn where programs are and are not working, and how to improve them to get better results for consumers.

The presentation used 3 examples of programs to show how even simple evaluations can give useful insights into how a program is working. Evaluation meant that each program's story is about the better outcomes for consumers, not about how busy the program organisers were. The conference participants (from all over Asia) seemed relieved that evaluation need not be as scary as they had thought!